Death of Hamo Ohanjanian (July 31, 1947)

Hamo Ohanjanian was a remarkable name in the history of the Armenian revolutionary movement, as well as the short-lived first independent Republic of Armenia, of which he was its third Prime Minister for six months.

His actual first name was Hamazasp. He was born in Akhalkalak on February 1, 1873, the date more generally accepted. He studied at the local school, and then graduated from the Russian school of Tiflis.

He entered the University of Moscow, where he studied medicine. However, due to his involvement with revolutionaries and his participation in student agitations, he was forbidden from continuing his studies and staying in Moscow, and he was forced to return to Tiflis. Her girlfriend from the student years, Olga Vavilevna, a Russian revolutionary, joined him. They married in 1897 and would have three children: two boys, Monik and Arik, and a daughter, Galia. Around this time, he entered the ranks of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

In 1899 Ohanjanian traveled to Switzerland and specialized in medicine at the University of Lausanne until 1902. Simultaneously, he continued his revolutionary activities, which did not end after his return to Tiflis. He became one of the leaders of the popular movement against the June 12, 1903 law of the imperial government that established the confiscation of the properties of the Armenian Church and one of the driving forces behind the “Caucasian Project” that was part of the turnaround of the A.R.F. to expand its activities into the Caucasus.

He participated in the third (Sofia, 1904) and fourth general assemblies (Vienna, 1907) of the ARF, and became a member of the Eastern Bureau of the organization. He played an important role in the maintenance of the internal discipline and ironclad structure of the organization, and also remained active during the wave of democratization that followed the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Armeno-Tatar conflict spurred by the Czarist regime of Russia.

Ohanjanian was arrested by the imperial government in 1908 along with 200 party members and sympathizers as part of a strong attempt to weaken the A.R.F. He was jailed in the infamous prison of Metekh, in Tiflis, where he was often subjected to torture to confess the “sins” of the party. His powerful defense during the “A.R.F. trial” of 1912 did not avoid him a sentence of four years of forced labor, but raised his profile and prestige among both Armenians and Russians.

He was first sent to Kharkov, in Ukraine, and then to Siberia, and Rubina Areshian, the close collaborator of the late Kristapor Mikayelian, one of the ARF founders, went after him to follow his steps and make continuous efforts for his liberation. They would marry during those years.

After the beginning of World War I, the Russian government made a crucial turnaround and approached the ARF in order to launch the Armenian volunteer movement. Among many others, Hamo Ohanjanian was liberated and returned from Siberia directly to Tiflis. As a doctor, he was at the Russian-Turkish battlefront helping the Armenian soldiers, and in Van became the right hand of Aram Manoukian, who was the governor during the brief period of liberation following the self-defense of April-May 1915 against the Ottoman troops.

Ohanjanian participated actively in the battle of Gharakilise (May 1918), where his son Monik gave his life for the defense of the homeland. After the independence, he devoted himself to consolidate the grounds of the newly created republic. He had an active role in international relations as a member of the delegation of the Republic in Europe. He was elected member of the A.R.F. Bureau in 1919, after the ninth general assembly of the party held in Yerevan, and became Minister of Foreign Affairs in January 1920.

In May 1920, after the failure of the Bolshevik rebellion, the cabinet of Prime Minister Alexander Khatisian resigned, and the political acute crisis forced the A.R.F. Bureau to become government. From May –November 1920, in the period of the “Bureau-government,” Hamo Ohanjanian was both Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. His son Viken (1920-2009) was born in this period.

After the Sovietization of Armenia in December 1920, Ohanjanian was arrested by the Soviet regime and imprisoned in Yerevan. The popular rebellion of February 1921 saved him and hundreds of prisoners from certain death, and after its end in early April, Ohanjanian went to Tabriz (Persia) via Zangezur. In 1923 he moved from Persia to Cairo, where he would live the rest of his life.

He was one of the founding members of the Hamazkayin Armenian Cultural and Educational Society in 1928 and president of the Society until his death. He had an important contribution to the foundation of the Armenian Lyceum (the Jemaran) in Beirut and its consolidation during its first decades. He was also re-elected member of the A.R.F. Bureau.

Hamo Ohanjanian passed away in Cairo on July 31, 1947. He was buried in the Egyptian capital. His tombstone was engraved with the following legend: “He lived in the way that he preached.”

Birth of Hovhannes Kajaznuni (February 1, 1868)

Hovhannes Kajaznuni was an important political figure, particularly in the crucial years of 1917-1920, and became one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Armenia as its first prime minister. He also was an accomplished architect, with important work done in Baku before the Russian Revolution and Armenia after the sovietization.

He was born on February 1, 1868, in Akhaltskha (now Akhaltsikhe in the region of Javakhk, Georgia). His family was originally from Erzerum. Their original surname was Igitkhanian, and his great-grandfather, a priest called Ter Hovhannes, had received permission from the Catholicos of All Armenians to change the surname to Ter-Hovhannisian. At his turn, his great-grandson translated the family name into Armenian, turning Igitkhanian into Kajaznuni; igit means “brave” in Turkish (kaj in Eastern Armenian, kach in Western).

Kajaznuni studied in Tiflis from 1877-1886, first in a private school and then in the royal school. In 1887 he entered the Institute of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg. Two years later, he married Satenik Mirimanian, despite her father’s opposition. They would have six children (four boys and two girls), and they would lose three of them to the service of the homeland. Ashot would die in the aftermath of his participation in the battle of Gharakilise (1918); Aram would die in the summer of 1920 fighting Tatar rebels in the region of Zangibasar (Masis); Ashot’s twin brother, Ruben, would be taken prisoner and killed by the Turks after the occupation of Kars (1920).

In his last years of studies, Kajaznuni joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. He graduated in 1893 with the title of architect. He moved to Baku, where he worked as engineer-architect in the regional architecture department from 1893-1895. After working for two years as an architect in Batum, from 1897-1899 he was a district architect for the municipal administration of Tiflis. He returned to Baku in 1899 and worked for the next seven years in the Oilmen’s Council as chief architect. He designed a hospital, residential buildings, and hotels in the area of Balakhan. He was also the designer and builder of the Cathedral of St. Thaddeus and Bartholomew in downtown Baku from 1907-1911, which would be destroyed by the Soviet Azerbaijani regime in the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, Kajaznuni had actively entered political life in 1906, becoming a member of the committee to end the Armeno-Tatar conflict in Baku. In 1909 he was arrested by the Russian police within the case that had been opened against the A.R.F. and left the empire in 1911 to avoid testifying in the trial. He lived in France, Belgium, and in the city of Van, in Western Armenia, where he wrote various articles in Russian on Shakespeare.

Returning to the Caucasus in 1914, he was elected a member of the Armenian National Council in 1917 and, after the Russian Revolution, he was elected to the Transcaucasian Parliament (Seim) in February 1918.

In the critical days of May 1918, Kajaznuni was a member of the Armenian delegation that participated in the conferences of peace in Trabizond and Batum. He was among the signatories of the Treaty of Batum on June 4, 1918, a few days after Armenia had declared its independence.

After the foundation of the Republic, Kajaznuni was designated first Prime Minister. The cabinet moved to Yerevan from Tiflis on July 19, 1918. In October, under pressure from the Council (Parliament) of Armenia, Kajaznuni resigned, but was charged by the Council with the formation of a new coalition government. The coalition was formed by the A.R.F. and the Armenian Populist Party, and would last until June 1919. Meanwhile, in April 1919 Kajaznuni traveled to the United States as part of a delegation to negotiate political and economic help to Armenia, and left the position of prime minister to Alexander Khadisian.

He returned to Armenia in September 1920 and was named vice-president of the Parliament, becoming president in the last days of the Republic, on November 25. After the sovietization, Kajaznuni was arrested and spent a month and a half in prison, until he was liberated by the February rebellion. In April 1921, after the failure of the rebellion, he left Armenia and lived in Iran, India, Egypt, and Romania. He wrote a report on the party’s situation, The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Has Nothing to Do Any Longer, which was published in 1923 and generated a big controversy. In 1924 he returned to Soviet Armenia.

He taught architectural planning at Yerevan Statue University and was a member of the technical council of the Institute of State Planning. He designed and directed the construction of cotton factories in Yerevan and Sardarabad, oil and soap factories in Yerevan, and housing for workers. He also built various buildings in Leninakan (nowadays Gyumri) after the earthquake of 1926. 

Kajaznuni was a victim of the Stalinist purges. His past condemned him. He was arrested in 1937 and died on January 15, 1938 from pneumonia in the prison of Yerevan. Otherwise, he had been condemned to be shot on December 5, 1937, but the prison doctor had temporarily postponed the sentence. His archives were confiscated and disappeared. Kajaznuni was rehabilitated in 1955, but his name remained in the shadows until the end of the Soviet period.

According to certain data, the first primer minister of the Republic of Armenia was buried in the cemetery of Kozern, in Yerevan. However, the cemetery was later destroyed and his tomb was lost. Thanks to the efforts of Kajaznuni’s daughter Margarit, a symbolic tombstone was erected in the city cemetery of Tokhmakh Lake.

Death of Shavarsh Missakian (January 26, 1957)

Shavarsh Missakian was a veteran journalist and political activist who played an important role both in the history of the Armenian press and the organization of the Diaspora.

He was born in August 1884, on the feast of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, in the village of Zimara, near Sepastia (Sivas). He moved to Constantinople in 1890 with his family, where he studied at the Getronagan School, and became a journalist at the age of sixteen.

He started his career in the daily Surhantag (1899-1908). During the early 1900s, in the last year of the tyrannical regime of Abdul Hamid II, he published and distributed revolutionary literature, and contributed to the journals Droshak (in Geneva) and Razmig (in Plovdiv, Bulgaria) of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which he joined in 1907. After the restoration of the Ottoman Constitution in 1908, he published the literary weekly Aztag, with Zabel Essayan, Kegham Parseghian, and Vahram Tatoul from 1908-1909. He also founded a bookstore called Ardziv, which doubled as a publishing house.

In 1911-1912 Missakian settled in Garin (Erzerum) as the editor of the A.R.F. newspaper Haratch. Afterwards, he returned to Constantinople and became a member of the editorial board of the A.R.F. daily Azatamart.

He initially escaped the arrest of Armenian intellectuals on the fateful night of April 24, 1915. He lived clandestinely until March 1916, heading a group of A.R.F. militants who had also escaped the arrests. He provided valuable information and articles to the journal Hayastan of Sofia (Bulgaria), published during 1915, about the ongoing Turkish repression and deportations. The Ottoman authorities could not locate him, and decided to deport his father to Konia, but the latter managed to escape. Shavarsh Missakian was denounced by a Bulgarian spy and arrested on March 26, 1916, when he tried to go to Bulgaria. He was imprisoned and tortured; he tried to escape by throwing himself from the third floor of the prison, but he broke his leg and was captured. He was condemned to death, but the sentence was commuted to five years of prison. In the end, he was freed after the armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918.



He soon became the editor-in-chief of the daily Djagadamart, which replaced Azatamart, closed on April 24, 1915. In 1919 he traveled to Armenia, where he participated in the ninth General Assembly of the A.R.F. in Yerevan.

The impending advance of the Kemalist forces over Constantinople compelled many Armenians, including Missakian, to take the route of exile. In November 1922 he left the Ottoman capital and moved to Sofia, where he married Dirouhi Azarian (1891-1964), whom he had known when she worked as the bookkeeper for Djagadamart. In November 1924 he was sent to Paris, where he participated in the tenth General Assembly of the A.R.F. (November 1924-January 1925) and was elected a member of the party Bureau, a position that he held until 1933.

In August 1925 he launched the daily Haratch as a personal undertaking. The daily soon became the main voice of the Armenian community of France, with a circulation of 5,000 copies and the sought-after articles of its publisher and editor. Haratch became also a gathering place for the young generation of Armenian writers in the 1920s and 1930s that would be known as the “Paris boys.” It appeared without interruption until the Nazi occupation of Paris, when Missakian decided to voluntarily close the newspaper in June 1940.

Haratch was reopened in April 1945, after the Liberation. Eight months later, in an editorial of December 1945, Missakian coined tseghasbanutiun, the Armenian word for an almost unknown term, “genocide.” He would be one of its frequent users in the press. In the same year, the editor of Haratch would undertake the organization of the new generation with the foundation of the A.R.F.-affiliated “Nor Seround” (equivalent to the Armenian Youth Federation in North America) and its journal Haiastan, which continues its publication.

Shavarsh Missakian directed Haratch until the last day. He passed away on January 26, 1957, and was buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. His daughter Arpik Missakian would succeed him in the direction of the journal, which she would publish for fifty-two more years, until May 2009, continuing her father’s traditions.

Missakian’s short memoir of his survival in the Ottoman prison, Leaves from a Yellowish Journal, was published in 1957, and a collection of his articles scattered in the Armenian press, entitled Days and Hours, in 1958. His memoir was translated into French by his daughter and published in 2015. A square named after him was inaugurated in the ninth arrondisement of Paris in 2007.

Birth of Sos Sargsyan (October 24, 1929)

Sos Sargsyan became one of the most renowned Armenian actors in the second half of the twentieth century.

He was born in Stepanavan, in the Lori region of Armenia, on October 24, 1929. He debuted on the stage in 1947 as David Copperfield in a homonymous play based on Charles Dickens’ novel. He moved to Yerevan in 1948 and started performing at the Theater of the Young Spectator. Meanwhile, he entered the Yerevan Fine Arts and Theatre Institute, from where he graduated in 1954. Upon graduation, at the age of twenty-five, he entered the Gabriel Sundukian Drama Theatre, the premier theatrical ensemble of the country, where he worked for the next thirty-seven years.

Sargsyan was one of those actors who did not need to make recourse to external emphasis and emotions in order to reflect his feelings. During his lengthy career, he performed roles in many plays both by Armenian and non-Armenian authors. Roles like Ben Alexander (William Saroyan’s My Heart is in the Mountains), Don Quixote (Mikhail Bulgakov’s homonymous play), Iago (William Shakespeare’s Othello), or King Lear (Shakespeare’s homonymous play), among others, cemented his fame.

He played in over forty films, including unforgettable roles in Armenian classic movies like Guys from the Army Band (1961), Triangle (1

Sos Sargsyan in the film "Pepo"

967, Armenian SSR State Prize in 1975), We Are Our Mountains (1969), Khatabala (1971), Nahapet (1977), Dzori Miro (1981), Gikor (1982), and others. His cinematographic participations included various Russian films, most particularly Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). He was the narrator of the documentary Matenadaran (1988, Armenian SSR State Prize).

In 1992 he established the Hamazkayin Theater, which he headed until the end of his life. Sargsyan continued directing and playing, both in theater and cinema. Simultaneously, he was the dean of the Yerevan Institute of Theater and Cinema from 1997-2005, and served as a member of its board of directors from 2006 until his death. He published several novels, memoirs, and collections of essays between 1991 and 2013.

His lengthy career of more than sixty years earned him many distinctions. He was named Popular Artist of Armenia in 1972 and of the Soviet Union in 1986). He was also awarded the Mesrop Mashtots medal of the Republic of Armenia (1996), the St. Sahak-St. Mesrop medal of the Armenian Church (2000), and the Mekhitar Gosh medal of the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh (2001). He was named honorary citizen of Yerevan in 2000 and earned the title of Professor in 2003.

Sos Sargsyan was also active in the political field. He was elected deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1989-1991, and in October 1991 he was nominated by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation as candidate in the first presidential election in independent Armenia. In 2009 he was elected to the National Assembly on the A.R.F. list. On the same year, he was elected as member of the Public Council, an advisory body to the President of Armenia.



The famous actor passed away on September 26, 2013, in Yerevan, and was buried at the Komitas Pantheon.

Death of Avetik Isahakian (October 17, 1957)

Avetik Isahakian was and remains a popular name in Armenian literature, particularly for the folkloric style of his poetry. Many of his poems have become songs.

He was born in Alexandropol (nowadays Gumri) on October 30, 1875. He spent his childhood and adolescence in the surrounding village of Ghazarapat, now called Isahakian after him. He studied at the Kevorkian Seminary of Holy Etchmiadzin, and from 1893-1895 he was an auditor at the University of Lepzig, in Germany.

He started writing in his youth years, while he also delved into political activities. He returned to Alexandropol in 1895 and became a member of the local committee of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. He was arrested by the Russian police in 1896 and spent a year imprisoned in the fortress of Yerevan.

He left the country after coming out of prison. In 1897 he went to the University of Zurich as auditor of history of literature and philosophy. A year later, he published his first book of poetry, Songs and Wounds. In 1902 he came back to the homeland and then settled in Tiflis. He published a second book of poetry, Poems, in 1903, followed by an enlarged edition of Songs and Wounds in 1908.

In 1908 the Russian government launched a repressive campaign against the revolutionary movements throughout the empire. Isahakian was among the 158 intellectuals arrested in the “A.R.F. case” and, after remaining for half year in the prison of Metekh, in Tiflis, he was liberated with a huge bail. The atmosphere was irrespirable and perhaps was one of the reasons besides the writing of the long poem Abu-Lala Mahari from 1909-1910. In 1910 the poet married Sofia Kocharian in the ruins of Ani. They moved first to Constantinople, where he published the poem in 1911, and then to Europe with their newly-born son, Vigen.

They settled in Berlin, where Isahakian would become one of the founders of the German-Armenian Society in 1914 together with a group of Armenian and German intellectuals. In 1916 the Isahakians moved to Geneva. The poet would actively follow the Armenian cause and reflect it in his writing, journal notes, and articles. He started writing a novel, Usta Garo, where he intended to present Armenian political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which remained unfinished despite working on it for many years. He published two collections of poems in 1920 and 1922, as well as the first version of his poem Mher of Sassoon, based on the final cycle of the Armenian epic.

Isahakian moved to Paris in 1924 and, after fifteen years in exile, he visited Soviet Armenia in 1926 and remained there for four years. He returned to Europe in 1930 and lived in the French capital for the next six years, where he was an activist on behalf of Soviet Armenia until 1936. In this year, he returned definitively to the homeland with his family.

In Armenia, where he was familiarly known as varpet (“master”), a title that he only shared with painter Martiros Sarian, Isahakian was the dean of Armenian literature in the hard times of Stalinist repression. He continued writing and publishing. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences of Armenia in 1943. He earned the State Prize of the USSR in 1946, and in this same year he was appointed president of the Writers Union of Armenia, a position he held until his death on October 17, 1957 in Yerevan.

Avetik Isahakian was buried in the “Komitas” Pantheon of Yerevan. His house-museum in Yerevan was opened in 1963 and another was later opened in Gumri. There are statues of him in both cities, as well as schools, streets, and libraries carrying his name in different towns of Armenia.

Deportation to Altai (June 14, 1949)

The great wave of repression of 1936-1938, which cost the lives of millions of Soviet citizens, had several thousands of victims in Armenia, including many people who were exiled to Siberia. During and after World War II, a second, less well-known wave would shatter many areas of the Soviet Union, including Armenia.

The preparations, in utmost secrecy, started in January 1949. By command of the Ministry of State Security of the USSR, lists of former Armenian Revolutionary members (Dashnaks), former war prisoners and members of the Nazi-sponsored Armenian Legions, repatriates, and their families were prepared.

On May 28, 1949, the ministry gave the order, and the next day, the USSR Council of Ministers, with Stalin’s signature, approved the “extremely secret” resolution No. 2214-856: “On the transportation, repopulation, and work allocation of those expelled from the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as the coastal areas of the Black Sea.”

A group of high-ranking officials of the Ministry of State Security arrived in Yerevan, led by Lieut.-Gen Yuri Yedunov, deputy head of the Second General Committee. The latter was well experiences in these matters, since he had managed the expulsion of the so-called families of “bandits and kulaks” of Latvia (28,981 people) on March 25-28 of the same year.

On the night of June 13-14, 1949, the unexpected happened. Both the locals, who already knew the Stalin inferno, and the repatriates, who took pains to get used to the whims of the totalitarian regime, were taken by surprise. Deportations were common as punishment from the 1920s, but they had skipped Armenians so far. That night, 2,754 families (12,300 people) were exiled from all regions of Soviet Armenia to the Altai territory, in the southeast of Western Siberia. Around twelve percent (1,578 people) of the deportees were repatriates. Of those families, the greatest number came from Yerevan (461) and Echmiadzin (182). Interestingly, the massive expulsion had no ethnic grounds; the deportees were known by the label of “Dashnaks.” The targeted repatriates were those with former Greek and Turkish citizenship.

They were sent by train in cargo wagons, and traveled for about two weeks until they were placed in the collective farms and state farms of the Altai region, without knowing why they were moved and what their fault was. The mass deportation was legalized much later, from November 1949-June 1950. A special committee adjunct to the Ministry of State Security prepared documents in the name of the elder of the exiled family or the member of the family who was the cause for exile.

The deportees were told that there was no return and they would stay there until their death. They were warned about leaving their area of residence, which would be penalized with 20 years of prison or forced labor. They had to present themselves once a week at the guard’s office to sign papers that confirmed their presence.

The exiles wrote letters addressed to the highest hierarchy of the country (Stalin, Beria, Malenkov, Voroshilov), as well as Grigor Harutiunian, First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, asking for leniency and explaining that they had committed no crime to deserve such a punishment. However, most of the time, those letters were useless, and the response was standard: “Your issue is not subject to review.”

The exiled families were involved in lumbering or farming. Neither their education nor their expertise counted. The repatriates, in particular, had big issues with language, since they mostly did not speak Russian, and this complicated their interactions at work and with the authorities. The children received their education only in Russian.

After Stalin’s death, the life of the exiled had some improvement. They were not allowed to return, but they could make “illegal” movements within the region of Altai, change their residence, find another job, et cetera. The authorities started giving encouraging responses to the letters written after Stalin’s death. A special commission was set up in 1954 to review the cases of the deportees. In the next two years, they were absolved of their “crimes,” and by 1956 the overwhelming majority of the exiled families were back in Armenia.

There is very little documentation about this tragic episode of Soviet Armenian history. It remained totally unspoken until the fall of the Soviet Union. Since 2006, June 14 is commemorated in the Armenian calendar as Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Repression. A memorial complex to the victims of repression during Soviet times was opened in Yerevan on December 3, 2008. Today there are some 6,000 victims of repression from 1937 and 1949, and 8,400 descendants of those victims living in Armenia.

Death of Keri (May 15, 1916)

Keri, a veteran leader of the Armenian liberation movement at the turn of the twentieth century, became also a prominent military figure in the last years of his life.

He was born Arshak Kavafian in 1858 in Erzerum, where he graduated from the local Armenian school. He was twenty-four when he entered the short lived self-defense organization “Defender of the Homeland,” founded in 1882. He adopted the pseudonym Keri, meaning “uncle.” He went to Kaghezvan, in the province of Kars (under Russian rule), in 1889 and unsuccessfully tried twice, in 1889-1890, to cross the Russian-Turkish border into Western Armenia with groups of fedayees. He became a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation soon after its foundation in 1890, and was active in the region of Kars from 1891-1892. In 1893 he finally was able to go to Erzerum with a group of freedom fighters, and in 1895 he led an armed group that protected the locals and the prelate during the Hamidian massacres.

In the early 1900s Keri was back in Kars under the command of the local A.R.F. committee. In 1903 he moved to the region of Sasun and participated in the Sasun uprising of 1904. After its defeat, he went to the region of Van and back to Eastern Armenian in 1905.

During the Armeno-Tatar conflict of 1905-1906, Keri was one of the leaders of the self-defense I in the region of Zangezur (Siunik), where he mostly fought in the front of Angeghagot. Afterwards, with fifteen years of fighting experience in both Ottoman and Russian empires, he went to Persia, where he fought alongside Yeprem Khan, one of the leaders of the Persian Constitutional Revolution, from 1908-1912. Yeprem was killed in battle in May 1912 and Kavafian had his killers liquidated, taking the leadership of the Caucasian troops until the end of the conflict late that year. 

After the declaration of World War I, Keri joined the Armenian volunteer movement attached to the Russian army as the commander of the fourth battalion in 1914. He led his battalion in the battle of Sarikamish, between the Ottoman and Russian armies, in late 1914-early 1915. The courage of the Armenian soldiers and Keri’s military genius was crucial in the Russian victory.

Keri's career came to an end on May 15, 1916, when he was on his way to Mosul. Surrounded by Turkish troops and separated from a Russian detachment, Keri led the charge of his soldiers in the middle of the night and was able to break the Turkish encirclement, but he was killed in the battle. His body was transferred to Tiflis and buried in the Armenian cemetery of Khojivank, along two other freedom fighters, Nikol Duman (1867-1914) and Mourad of Sepastia (1874-1918). A procession of 30,000 people participated in the burial. However, the cemetery was mostly leveled during Soviet times, and Keri’s tomb also disappeared.

Death of Alexander Khatisian (March 10, 1945)

Alexander Khatisian, one of the prime ministers of the first Republic of Armenia, was a remarkable public figure before and after the crucial years of 1918-1920. 

 

He was born in Tiflis (nowadays Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, on February 17, 1874. He belonged to a well-to-do family. His brother Kostandin Khatisian (1864-1913) was among the founding members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation.

 

After graduating from the local gymnasium (Russian high school) in 1891, Khatisian went to Russia to pursue higher education. He studied medicine at the universities of Moscow and Kharkov, and graduated in 1897. He mastered half a dozen languages, including English, French, and German.

 

From 1898 to 1900 he traveled abroad for specialization courses in the best clinics. He visited Italy, France, and Germany, where he also studied public hygiene, laws, and municipal work in slaughterhouses, hospitals, and water works. Later on, he would publish articles and pamphlets on cultural and health-related topics.

 

Upon his return to Tiflis, in 1900, Khatisian worked as a doctor, and also entered the political arena. In 1902 he was elected to the City Council, and in 1905 he became a member of the City Board. He participated in the revolutionary movements of 1905. He wanted to join the A.R.F. at that date, but he was dissuaded by Rostom, one of the party founders, and Hamo Ohanjanian, among others, who argued that he could better serve the Armenian people and the party as a non-partisan. In 1907 he became an assistant to the mayor of Tiflis, and from 1910-1917 served as mayor of Tiflis. He was president of the Caucasus branch of the Union of Cities (including a total of forty-four cities) from 1914-1917.

 

During World War I, Khatisian was among the organizers of assistance for Armenian refugees and genocide survivors. He collaborated with the formation of the Armenian volunteer battalions and was elected vice-president of the Armenian National Bureau of Tiflis from 1915-1917.

 

After the February Revolution of 1917, Khatisian entered the ranks of the A.R.F. During that decisive year, he led the National Bureau until October, presided over the Council of Armenian Political Parties (March-April), and participated in the convention of peasants of Transcaucasia (June 1917). He moved to Armenia at the end of the year and was elected mayor of Alexandropol (nowadays Gumri). In February 1918 he participated in the peace negotiations held with the Ottoman Empire in Trebizonda (Trabzon).

However, in April 1918 he went back to Tiflis, when he was designated Minister of Finances and Provisions of the short-lived Republic of Transcaucasia. In May he returned to the table of negotiations with the Turks, and was one of the three Armenian representatives who signed the Treaty of Batum on June 4, 1918, where the Ottoman Empire recognized the independence of Armenia over a stretch of territory.

 

He moved to Yerevan, and Prime Minister Hovhannes Kajaznuni designated him as Minister of Foreign Affairs. After Kajaznuni left Armenia in February 1919 on official mission, in April Khatisian was designated acting Prime Minister and was confirmed as Prime Minister in May, while also retaining his position in Foreign Affairs. He reshuffled his cabinet first in August 1919 and then in the spring of 1920.

After the failed May 1920 uprising engineered by Armenian Communists, Khatisian resigned from his post. He was replaced by Hamo Ohanjanian, the representative of the A.R.F. Bureau, while the Bureau members took the cabinet posts. Khatisian traveled abroad in the summer to organize a loan for the country within the Armenian communities and create a “Golden Fund.”

 

After his return, on the eve of the Sovietization, he signed the Treaty of Alexandropol along the representatives of Mustafa Kemal on behalf of the Republic of Armenia in the early morning of December 2-3, 1920.

 

After the fall of the Republic, Khatisian settled in Paris. He continued his political activities, and participated in the Lausanne Conference in 1922-1923 defending the rights of the Armenian people. He was a member of various Armenian and Russian public organizations. He published his memoirs of his time as mayor of Tiflis and the volume The Origin and Development of the Republic of Armenia (1930).

 

During World War II and the occupation of Paris, Khatisian moved to Portugal. However, after the liberation of the French capital, he was arrested under trumped-up charges of collaboration with the Nazis, but was soon liberated due to lack of proofs. He passed away on March 10, 1945, in Paris

Birth of Pierre Quillard (July 14, 1864)

Pierre Quillard was a French poet and translator, but he is equally known for his political engagement, especially to the Armenian Cause.

He was born in Paris on July 14, 1864. He studied at the Lyceum Fontanes, where he had a host of distinguished fellow students, including poet René Ghil (1863-1925). He pursued higher education at the School of Letters at the Sorbonne. He graduated in 1885 and then followed graduate studies at École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École des Chartes.

He founded the literary journal La Pléiade in 1884 with two friends. A follower of symbolist poetry, in 1890 he published his first collection, La gloire du verbe (The Glory of the Word). He would reprint the book, including new poems, in 1897, with the title La Lyre héroïque et dolente (The Heroic and Grieving Lyre). Quillard followed the fashionable current of symbolism. Among other publications, from 1891 until his death he would be a contributor to the famous literary magazine Mercure de France.

After his academic studies, the poet had fallen in love with Hellenism. In 1888 he started publishing studies on Greek classical literature, followed by several translations of Sophocles, Iamblichus, and other authors in the 1890s. Some of them were performed in theater.

A turning point in his life was his departure to Constantinople in 1893 to become a teacher at the Armenian catholic lyceum St. Gregory the Illuminator. (Another poet, Taniel Varoujan, would become its principal two decades later, until the fatidic date of April 24, 1915.) He remained in his position until 1896, witnessing the oppression of Abdul Hamid’s regime. In 1897 he followed the Turkish-Greek war as a correspondent for L’Illustration. Upon his returned to France in the same year, he took over the defense of the Armenians and of other oppressed peoples. Together with poet Arshag Tchobanian, he compiled a series of testimonies on the Hamidian massacres of 1894-1896, which he published in a voluminous book in 1897. He also organized many gatherings about the situation in Western Armenia.

Quillard was also engaged in the political scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair and took the defense of Alfred Dreyfus, the French soldier of Jewish origin unjustly condemned for treason. He adhered to the League of Human Rights since its foundation in 1898.

His political engagement led him to almost leave literature aside. In October 1900 he became the editor in chief of the bimonthly Pro Armenia, published by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, to promote the Armenian Cause. The editorial board was composed of famous names in the pro-Armenian movement of France, such as Jean Jaures, Anatole France, Georges Clemanceau, and Francis de Pressensé. After  following the Ottoman Revolution (1908), Pro-Armenia resumed publication in 1912, first with the name of Pour les peoples d’Orient, and then again as Pro Armenia (1913-1914). Quillard returned to the Ottoman Empire in 1904 as correspondent for L’Illustration. In 1904 he became member of the central committee of the League of Human Rights, and in 1907 was elected vice-president. He would rise to the position of general secretary in 1911. 

On February 4, 1912, at the age of 47, Pierre Quillard passed away from a massive heart attack in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was buried in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in Paris, and eight young Armenians carried his coffin on their shoulders to its final destination. A telegram sent by the A.R.F. to the editorial offices of Mercure de France stated:

“We are stricken by the unexpected loss of Pierre Quillard, brave director of Pro Armenia, defender of oppressed people. We send our condolences to the members and contributors of Pro Armenia, Pressensé, Anatole France, Clemanceau, Jaur Jaurès, Bérard, Roberty, d'Estournelles, Cochin, all those who have supported our case in the great days of misfortune. His beloved memory will live among us in the relevant work for the fraternization of the races of the Orient.” 

Birth of Levon Shant (April 6, 1869)

Levon Shant was perhaps the most important playwright in the history of Armenian theater, but he was primarily a seasoned and accomplished educator. He was also an active participant in the Armenian liberation movement. 

Shant was born Levon Nahashbedian on April 6, 1869, in Constantinople. He lost his parents at an early age and adopted the last name Seghposian after his father Seghpos. He attended the Armenian school of Scutari (now Uskudar) until 1884, and then the Gevorgian seminary at Holy Etchmiadzin for the next seven years. He returned to Constantinople in 1891, where he worked as a teacher. He published his first literary piece in the local daily Hairenik in the same year. In 1893 he departed to Germany, where he studied science, child psychology, education, literature, and history in the universities of Leipzig, Jena, and Munich. Meanwhile, he started his literary career with the poem The Mountain Girl (1892), published under the pen name Levon Shant (shant/շանթ means “lightning”), but soon shifted to a series of novellas (Dreamlike Days and The Outsiders, 1894; Vergine, 1896; The Return, 1896, and The Actress, 1898). After finishing his university studies in 1899, he taught for more than a decade at the Gayanian Girls School in Tiflis and the Diocesan School of Yerevan. He became a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in the 1890s.
The turn of the century brought in him a different literary persona: the playwright. He wrote his first play, The Egoist, in 1901, followed by For Someone Else (1903), and On the Road (1904). After this string of plays inspired in contemporary life, he turned to the historical past and wrote his masterpiece Ancient Gods (1909), published in 1912, which made a huge impact on the Armenian literary world when it was premiered in Tiflis (1913). This was the first of several successful historical dramas he would write over the next two decades: The Emperor (1916), The Enchained One (1918-1921), The Princess of the Fallen Fortress (1922), Oshin the Bailiff (1932).
In Tiflis, Shant participated actively in the gatherings of the literary circle “Vernadun” (Վերնատուն), held at the attic of poet Hovhannes Tumanian’s home, and was in close contact with other writers of the group, like Ghazaros Aghayan, Avetik Isahakian, and Derenik Demirjian. In 1909 he published, together with Hovhannes Tumanian and Stepan Lisitsian, the series of Armenian textbooks Lusaber.
In 1911 he returned to his birthplace, Constantinople, and taught at the Central (Getronagan) and Esayan schools until 1914. By that time he was already married and moved with his family to Lausanne in Switzerland. He returned to the Caucasus in 1915 to supervise the publication of textbooks, but was unable to go back to Europe and remained in Tiflis until 1917, when he returned to Switzerland. However, after the independence of Armenia, he returned to Yerevan, where he became a vice-president of the Parliament of the first Republic. In April 1920 he led a delegation to Moscow to carry out negotiations with the Soviet regime, which would fail in the end. He was imprisoned by the new government after the Soviet takeover, but freed following the uprising of February 1921. In April 1921, after the end of the uprising, he left Armenia.
For the next thirty years of his life, Shant would live abroad, first in Paris, then in Cairo, and finally in Beirut. He wrote political essays, like Nationhood as the Basis of Human Society (1922) and Our Independence (1925). In 1928, together with educator and literary critic Nikol Aghbalian, theater director Kaspar Ipekian, and former prime minister of the Republic, Dr. Hamo Ohanjanian, as well as a group of less known A.R.F. members, he was one of the main founders of the Hamazkayin Armenian Cultural and Educational Society in Cairo. In 1930, together with Nikol Aghbalian, he settled in Beirut, where they founded the Armenian Lyceum (Jemaran) of Hamazkayin in 1930, later known as the Nishan Palanjian Lyceum and currently as Haig and Melanchton Arslanian Lyceum. Shant was the school principal for the next twenty years, while at the same time he taught pedagogy and psychology. He created a unique pedagogical atmosphere in the Jemaran, focused on his belief that the school should educate a humanistic education also linked to the preservation and development of national identity.
Engaged as he was in education and school management, Shant continued with the task of preparing school textbooks. He did not leave literature. In 1945 he published the novel The Thirsty Souls, and from 1946-1951 he published an edition of works in eight volumes, which included a yet unpublished history of Armenian literature. He passed away on November 29, 1951.
His name was banned in Soviet Armenia, as were many other writers who were A.R.F. members or sympathizers. Nevertheless, a monograph about him was published there in 1930, and a collection of his plays appeared in 1968. After the second independence, a school in Yerevan was renamed after him in 1994.

Birth of Nikol Duman (January 12, 1867)

Nikol Duman was one of the protagonists of the Armenian national movement of liberation from its early days until his death, from the expedition of Khanasor until the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. As national hero General Antranig once wrote, “Duman could rule over everyone and give orders, and everyone would know where to be and what to do.”

He was born Nikoghayos Ter-Hovhannisian in the village of Kishlak (nowadays Tzaghkashat) of the district of Askeran (Mountainous Gharabagh). His father, a priest, sent him to the Diocesan School of Shushi in 1876, from where he graduated in 1887. For the next four years, after a short stint at the Ecclesiastical Council of Shushi, he worked as a teacher at the Armenian schools of the Northern Caucasus.

The revolutionary movement had started among the Armenians of the Caucasus with the foundation of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party (Geneva, 1887) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Tiflis, 1890). Education was the way to sow the seeds of the future and to attract the sympathy of the people. In 1891 Ter-Hovhannisian’s former schoolmate Hovnan Davtian was appointed principal of one of the Armenian schools of Tabriz, in Iranian Azerbaijan, and invited him as a teacher. Tabriz was a hub of revolutionary activities. In 1892 Ter-Hovhannisian participated in the first general assembly of the A.R.F. and, after Davtian’s departure to Geneva as newly-appointed editor of the party organ Droshak, he took a new teaching position in the nearby city of Salmast in 1894. A year later, he went to the nearby monastery of Derek, a center of revolutionary activity, and participated in the victorious self-defense fights against Turks and Kurds.

The tall, black-bearded fighter was one of the leaders in the combats of Saray-Boghazkiasan a few months later. The defeated Kurds, deeply impressed by his bravery, called him Duman (“storm”) in their songs. Nikoghayos Ter-Hovhannisian, whose first name was already shortened to Nikol, became Nikol Duman.

In the same year, Duman went to Van with a group of fifty fedayees (freedom fighters). In 1896 he came up with the idea of avenging the death of the young Armenians who had defended Van during the Hamidian massacres and who had perished in an ambush by the Kurdish Mazrik tribe during their retreat to Persia. The outcome was the expedition of Khanasor (July 1897), in which Duman was one of its leaders. He later went back to the Caucasus and settled in Baku. In 1904 he attempted to cross into Western Armenia to help the rebellion of Sassoun with a group of fedayees, but he engaged in combat with Kurdish gangs near the Turkish-Persian border and could not reach his aim.

Nikol Duman led the Armenian self-defense forces in the province of Yerevan and the plain of Ararat during the Armeno-Tatar inter-ethnic conflict of 1905-1906. Later, he left the Caucasus and went to Europe to avoid the persecution of the Czarist police. One of the “intellectual fedayees,” he stated his opposition to the “Caucasian Project” approved in the crucial 4th General Assembly of the A.R.F. (Vienna, 1907), which allowed the party to enter in an alliance with Russian revolutionaries. He also published a booklet, Project of Popular Self-Defense (Geneva, 1907), which became one of the mainstays of the strategic literature of the Armenian liberation movement.

In 1910 he was one of the representatives of the A.R.F. in the congress of the Second International held in Copenhagen (Denmark). A year later, he participated in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, where the party had been active since 1908, and led the victorious defense of Tabriz against the counter-revolutionary forces in September 1911. When the Russian intervention turned the tide against the revolution, in late 1911 Nikol Duman gathered his group of fedayees and went to Western Armenia, where he stayed until 1913. Finally, he returned to the Caucasus.

At the beginning of World War I, Duman was opposed to the organization of the Armenian volunteer battalions in the Caucasus, since the 8th General Assembly (Erzerum, 1914) had not approved it. He was a natural candidate to lead one of them. However, his wandering and active life had taken its toll on his health. After his arthritic pains, he had got infected with tuberculosis. He could not stay in the hospital, waiting patiently for death while his comrades were in the battlefields. He had only one solution: on September 27, 1914 he committed suicide. He was buried in the cemetery of Khojivank, in Tiflis, near Simon Zavarian, one of the founders of the A.R.F.

Death of Hamo Ohanjanian (July 31, 1947)

Ohanjanian was a prominent member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in the first half of the twentieth century and also served as Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

He was born in Akhalkalak (Javakhk, nowadays Georgia) in 1873. After his elementary studies in his birthplace, he moved to Tiflis, where he graduated from the Russian lyceum. He entered medical school in Moscow (1892), where he joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and because of his participation in student agitation, he was left out of the university. He returned to Tiflis, and in 1899 he continued his studies in Lausanne (Switzerland), which he finished in 1902. He returned to Tiflis in 1902, where he became a leading figure of the party, and in 1905 was elected a member of the Eastern Bureau of the A.R.F. He would coordinate the popular action that opposed the confiscation of the properties of the Armenian Church in 1903 and he established relations with Russian and Georgian revolutionaries during the revolutionary movements of Russia in 1905-1907. He played an important role in the crucial A.R.F. Fourth General Assembly (Vienna, 1907), where he helped preserve the unity of the party by stopping extreme-left and extreme-right wing dissension.

In 1908 the Czarist government launched a persecution against revolutionary parties, including the A.R.F. Ohanjanian, together with 160 party members, was arrested. He was sentenced to hard labor in Siberia during the infamous “Trial of the Tashnagtsutiun” in 1912. Roubina Areshian, one of the organizers of the failed attempt against Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1905, followed him there and married him.

In 1915 Ohanjanian was set free thanks to the intercession of Catholicos Kevork V and Caucasus viceroy Ilarion Vorontsov-Dashkov. He returned to Tiflis and assisted the volunteer battalions as a physician, as well as the refugees from Western Armenia.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, he departed to Petrograd and Kharkov to exhort Armenians to bring their help to the refugees. In May 1918 he participated in the battle of Gharakilise, where his elder son (born from his first marriage to Olga Vavileva) was killed.

After the birth of Armenia, Ohanjanian became a member of the Delegation of the Republic presided by Avetis Aharonian to participate in the Peace Conference in Europe. He remained in the West until the beginning of 1920. In October 1919 he was elected member of the A.R.F. Bureau during its Ninth General Assembly held in Yerevan.

He returned to the Armenian capital in January 1920 as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the cabinet of Alexander Khatisian. Following the failed Bolshevik uprising of May 1, 1920, Khatisian resigned, and Ohanjanian was charged with forming a new government on May 5, 1920. It was called the Bureau-Government, because all of its members were members of the A.R.F. Bureau.

Ohanjanian’s premiership coincided with the most crucial period of the Republic of Armenia, which would practically lead to its demise. The Treaty of Sevres was signed on August 10, 1920, but the following Armeno-Turkish war, started in September, ended with the defeat of the Armenian army. Ohanjanian resigned on November 23, 1920. Simon Vratzian would become the fourth and last prime minister, and ten days later the Soviet regime was established.

Ohanjanian, with other A.R.F. leaders, was imprisoned in January 1921 during the wave of terror that followed the Sovietization. The prisoners were saved by the popular rebellion of February 1921. After the end of the rebellion in April 1921, Ohanjanian moved to Zangezur and then to Iran. In the end, he settled in Egypt, where he would live until his death.

Besides his political activities as a party member, Ohanjanian, well-aware of the importance of language and culture for the preservation and development of the Armenian identity in the Diaspora, became a founding member of the Hamazkayin Cultural Association in 1928 and its chairman for the next 18 years. He also provided important support for the establishment of the Armenian Lyceum of Beirut in 1930.

The former prime minister of the Republic of Armenia passed away on July 31, 1947 in Cairo, where he was buried.